Victorian Science Fiction, 1871-85: The Rise of the Alternative History Sub-Genre

Abstract

The year 1871 witnesses a sudden development in UK SF, opening a period in the history of the genre which extends—according to the point of view one adopts—to 1901 (with Wells’s The First Men in the Moon), to the First World War, or even into the 1930s. The principal sub-genres of this period in SF are the Extraordinary Voyage, the Future War Novel, and the Alternative Histoty (Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race prefigures all three). The Alternative History, which succeeds and supplants the Classical Utopia cum static “anatomy,” presents an alternate fictional place displaying various solutions to current societal problems through an imagined alteration (varying in extent) of world history. Focusing on a group of 33 such Histories (as specified in note), Suvin finds that those of the years 1871-79 can be classed as either “comico-satiric” or “serious,” and those of 1880-85 as “coarse” or “relatively sophisticated.” His analysis is directed not only towards identifying the formal characteristics and thematic concerns of such Alternative Histories but also the ideological and social conditions which give them their raison d’être and their significance. The high points of the sub-genre through 1885, both from an aesthetic point of view and as social criticism, come with Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884; which anticipates, inter alia, Zamiatin) and Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885; which looks ahead to Wells and beyond). (RMP)